Pat Howard: Kanzius project's evolution raises questions in Erie

The prospect that the late John Kanzius had invented a breakthrough cancer treatment has for years united this community behind an unimpeachable goal that came with a heaping dose of hope and an enduring hometown glow.

The goal remains. But recent events have caused the glow to flicker a bit.

Kanzius' idea of using radio waves to kill the disease that was killing him became a major cause in Erie, one that's raised a lot of money and generated a potent blend of pride and resolve. While Kanzius didn't live to see it through, the science of vetting his vision carried on at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Every advance in the lab has been big news back home. But as new developments remind us, what Kanzius started is also a business, and always was.

The confluence of charity, science and commerce is where the picture gets murky. As the project approaches the on-ramp to human trials, it's in flux in ways that make its connection to Erie more tenuous and its structure more opaque.

Those developments are led by the sale of the intellectual property and patent rights from Therm Med LLC, a partnership Kanzius created, to AkesoGenX, a Colorado company created specifically for the job. AkesoGenX was put together by the lead researcher on the project, Steven Curley, M.D., and Robert Zavala, who's described as a nanotechnology expert.

Zavala wouldn't say what AkesoGenX paid Therm Med. Kanzius' widow, Marianne Kanzius, who served as Therm Med's managing partner, offered only a statement that said Therm Med was pleased that her husband's technology is "in capable hands with the scientific and business expertise to take this project to the next level."

Word that the enterprise had changed hands came on the heels of a couple of developments involving Curley, who's steering the scientific process and whose role in AkesoGenX remains ambiguous. One involves his personal life, the other where he does his work.

The Houston Chronicle reported earlier this month that Curley was charged in 2013 with unlawful reception of electronic communication, a felony, based on accusations that he installed spyware on his ex-wife's computer in November 2011. Another man charged with helping Curley had been a systems analyst at M.D. Anderson, where Curley's ex-wife also worked.

The criminal case is beside the point, perhaps, but it does raise questions about a couple of the capable hands Marianne Kanzius referred to. Curley told Erie Times-News reporter David Bruce via e-mail that "the allegations against me are false and fabricated, that will be shown." His preliminary hearing is now set for Feb. 26.

Word of Curley's legal trouble came packaged with the news that he left M.D. Anderson at year's end and took the Kanzius research to another Houston cancer center, at the Baylor College of Medicine. He said the work would move forward more quickly there.

"I left because it is a chance to grow, not for any negative reason," Curley told Bruce.

We're left to take his word on that for now, though the timing and his co-defendant's and ex-wife's ties to M.D. Anderson give pause. M.D. Anderson officials confirmed to the Houston Chronicle in early January that the co-defendant no longer worked there.

A sense of unease has begun to bubble in Erie at the totality of events combined with a shortage of illumination from Marianne Kanzius and officials of the Kanzius Cancer Research Foundation, a local nonprofit formed to help fund the research. We see it in letters to the editor, and I hear it in my travels.

Folks are still invested in what's most important -- the potential that science will bear out what the radio wave treatment's inventor envisioned. But some are also working through what to make of the ownership change and the cloudy circumstances surrounding the lead researcher.

The executive director and mouthpiece of the Kanzius Cancer Research Foundation, Mark Neidig, has been relentlessly scripted as usual. Neidig is a fundraiser whose job has been to tend the Kanzius narrative, and channel people's hopes into it, to keep the money flowing.

"Our mission has not changed," Neidig said. But how people view it might.

Neidig and company are used to pitching people who have viewed the project largely through the lens of charity and hope, and have been inspired by the idea that it's been animated from Erie. Now some are just starting to face the fact that they're helping to fund not just important cancer research, but also research and development for a business with the potential to get very big.

Write to Managing Editor Pat Howard at 205 W. 12th St., Erie, PA 16534, or e-mail him at pat.howard@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNhoward.